-Have a look at our SoC pages from [[2008|docs/developer/GoogleSoC2008/]], [[2009|docs/developer/gsoc2009]] and [[2010|docs/developer/gsoc2010]] to get an overview about prior year's projects.

+Have a look at our SoC pages from [[2008|/docs/developer/GoogleSoC2008/]], [[2009|/docs/developer/gsoc2009/]], [[2010|/docs/developer/gsoc2010/]], [[2011|/docs/developer/gsoc2011/]], and [[2012|/docs/developer/gsoc2012/]], to get an overview about prior year's projects.

For more details on Google's Summer of Code: [Google's SoC page](http://socghop.appspot.com/)

Note to prospective students: These project proposals are meant to be a first approximation; we're looking forward to your own suggestions (even for completely new directions) and will try to integrate your ideas to make the GSoC project more interesting to all parties. Even when a proposal is very specific about the goals that must be achieved and the path that should be taken, these are always negotiable. Keep in mind that we have tried to limit the proposals on this page to those that (based on our past experience) are appropriate for the GSoC program. This is by no means a comprehensive list, original ideas or proposals based on project ideas found on other pages are very welcome.

Note to everyone else: These proposals are by no means Summer of Code specific, anyone is welcome and encouraged to adopt any of these projects at any time (just please let us know, or make a note on this page).

-* Create a new kernel subsystem to manage quota's in a filesystem agnostic manner by interfacing with the kernel VFS layer.

-* Create filesystem-agnostic quota support tools for userland that obtain information in the same manner as eg: du(1) instead of parsing the filesystem internals directly as the existing quota tools do (see quotacheck(8), repquota(8), edquota(8), ...).

-* The quota file storage can be modeled after the existing UFS code that does the same, but should use the more general bytes, files and/or directories metrics instead of the somewhat UFS-specific blocks and inodes.

+---

+

+##### Port pf firewall changes from FreeBSD

+

+DragonFly's version of the pf firewall was brought in from OpenBSD 4.7. FreeBSD imported the pf from OpenBSD 4.8 and has significantly enhanced the SMP performance of the firewall. Port the FreeBSD version of pf.

-The idea here is to support the execution of 32 bit DragonFly binaries in 64 bit DragonFly environments, something numerous other operating systems have done. Several things must be done to support this. First, the appropriate control bits must be set to execute in 32-bit compatibility mode while in usermode instead of 64-bit mode. Second, when a system call is made from 32-bit mode a translation layer is needed to translate the system call into the 64-bit requivalent within the kernel. Third, the signal handler and trampoline code needs to operate on the 32-bit signal frame. Fourth, the 32 and 64 bit ELF loaders both have to be in the kernel at the same time, which may require some messing around with procedure names and include files since originally the source was designed to be one or the other.

+The Graphics Execution Manager is a memory management system dedicated

+to Intel graphics chipsets. Along with KMS, it is a requirement of

+2010 and more recent Intel Xorg drivers.

-There are several hundred system calls which translates to a great deal of 'grunt work' when it comes time to actually do all the translations.

+The dports third-party application collection already contains all the userland bits needed to use the new drivers, provided WITH_NEW_XORG and WITH_KMS options are used in make.conf

+* Add a syscall table which translates Linux system calls to DragonFly ones

+* Add support for ELF binary detection.

-##### Port valgrind to DragonFlyBSD

-

-Valgrind is a very useful tool on a system like DragonFly that's under heavy development. Since valgrind is very target specific, a student doing the port will have to get acquainted with many low level details of the system libraries and the user<->kernel interface (system calls, signal delivery, threading...). This is a project that should appeal to aspiring systems programmers. Ideally, we would want the port to be usable with vkernel processes, thus enabling complex checking of the core kernel code.

+DragonFly/i386 supports the execution of 32 bit Linux binaries; it

+is only natural to implement the same kind of binary compatibility

+for 64-bit systems.

-The goal of this project is to port valgrind to the DragonFlyBSD platform so that at least the memcheck tool runs sufficiently well to be useful. This is in itself a challenging task. If time remains, the student should try to get at least a trivial valgrind tool to work on a vkernel process.

+Some of the other *BSD systems may already have implemented such a mechanism.

Meta information:

-* Prerequisites: C, x86 assembly, low-level OS internals

-* Difficulty: Hard

-* Contact point: Aggelos Economopoulos <aoiko@cc.ece.ntua.gr>

+* Prerequisites: C, i386 and amd64 architecture knowledge

+* Difficulty: Moderate to difficult

+* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org

---

-##### Adapt pkgsrc to create a package system with dependency independence.

-* Create a set of tools that modifies how the pkgsrc packages are installed, allowing for the ability to upgrade individual packages, without stopping applications that depend on said packages from working. One method of achieving this is detailed at http://www.dragonflybsd.org/goals/#packages but other methods may be possible. PC-BSD have written a tool called PBI Builder which modifies FreeBSD ports for their dependency independence PBI system, this could be used as a starting point for the DragonFly BSD tools.

+The DragonFly jails were updated from FreeBSD-4.8 capability to FreeBSD 5.1 capability in 2005. They haven't been improved on since. This goal of this project is to make DragonFly jails to be functionally identical to FreeBSD 9.x jail functionality such that software designed to work using modern FreeBSD jail functions will work on DragonFly without modification.

Meta information:

-* Prerequisites: C

-* Difficulty: ?

+* Prerequisites: C, OS Internals

+* Difficulty: Moderate to difficult

* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org

---

-##### Implement virtio drivers on DragonFly to speed up DragonFly as a KVM guest

+##### Make allocation in the DragonFly kernel NUMA-aware

-As virtualization is coming more and more and KVM will be a strong player in that field,

-we want DragonFly to have top-notch support for this virtualization platform. For this

-purpose, we'd like to have a virtio-based implementation of a paravirtualized disk and

-The goal of this project is to create a virtio-ring implementation and then to implement drivers

-for the network and block devices described in the specification linked to above. This is a great

-project for a student who wants to get experience writing (real-world, high-performance) device

-drivers without having to deal with the quirks of real hardware.

+* This is a huge project, the initial GSoC portion of this project should focus only on creating infrastructure and proving out that infrastructure. The initial work should attempt to not create or enforce any specific allocation _policies_ based on the available NUMA information, simply provide that information in an easy to access and use fashion and create the possibility at various levels of implementing a future allocation policy. This could be initially proven out with simple dummy policies.

Meta information:

-* Prerequisites: C, elementary OS internals

-* Difficulty: Medium

+* Prerequisites: C, introductory computer architecture

+* Difficulty: Easy-Hard

* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org

---

-##### Port PUFFS from FreeBSD/NetBSD

+##### Port valgrind to DragonFlyBSD

-* http://www.netbsd.org/docs/puffs/

-* This would make many userspace filesystems available to DragonFly, e.g. sshfs to mention only one.

+Valgrind is a very useful tool on a system like DragonFly that's under heavy development. Since valgrind is very target specific, a student doing the port will have to get acquainted with many low level details of the system libraries and the user<->kernel interface (system calls, signal delivery, threading...). This is a project that should appeal to aspiring systems programmers. Ideally, we would want the port to be usable with vkernel processes, thus enabling complex checking of the core kernel code.

+

+The goal of this project is to port valgrind to the DragonFlyBSD platform so that at least the memcheck tool runs sufficiently well to be useful. This is in itself a challenging task. If time remains, the student should try to get at least a trivial valgrind tool to work on a vkernel process.

* Implement some or all of these subsystems in their entirety, or as completely as possible in userland using a daemon, mmap and the DragonFly umtx_sleep(2)/umtx_wakeup(2) or other userland facilities.

* Any security or other major hurdles to this approach that would likely have to be implemented in-kernel should be noted in the students application.

* unionfs is a particularly useful pseudo-fs which allows to have an upper and a lower filesystem on a single mountpoint. The upper mountpoint is mostly transparent, so that the lower mountpoint is accessible.

* A typical use case is mounting a tmpfs filesystem as the upper and a read-only FS as the lower mp. This way files can be edited transparently even on a RO filesystem without actually modifying it.

-* The current unionfs is completely broken as it relies on the whiteout VFS technique which is not supported by HAMMER.

+* The current unionfs is completely broken as it relies on the whiteout VFS technique which is not supported by HAMMER. A new unionfs implementation should not rely on archaic methods such as whiteout.

-* Some devices support an ATA command, 'TRIM', which marks disk blocks as 'not in use'; on SSDs, for example, not-in-use blocks can be used to support better wear leveling and to prevent performance degradation over time with fragmentation of the free block set.

-* Once BIO_DELETE commands are possible, it'd be very nice for DragonFly's swap code to generate BIO_DELETE commands for unused swap blocks (batch them!); this would would work well with SSDs and swapcache

-* HAMMER should also send BIO_DELETE commands to mark unused blocks unused. Running HAMMER on an SSD would be more pleasant then.

-* FreeBSD implemented this support on Jan 29th for UFS; it may serve as a good reference.

-

-Meta information:

-

-* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, a touch of file systems

-* Difficulty: Not too hard

-* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org

-

----

-

##### Access to ktr(4) buffers via shared memory

Our event tracing system, ktr(4), records interesting events in per-cpu buffers that are printed out with ktrdump(8). Currently, ktrdump uses libkvm to access these buffers, which is suboptimal. One can allow a sufficiently-privileged userspace process to map those buffers read-only and access them directly. For bonus points, design an extensible, discoverable (think reflection) mechanism that provides fast access via shared memory to data structures that the kernel chooses to expose to userland.

-This is a project for a student with something to prove, executing a binary touches a huge number of moving parts of a modern kernel. This project would entail adding or porting support for Mach-O binaries to the DragonFly BSD kernel. It would also involve adding an additional system call vector, like the Linux vector used for linux binary emulation. This is quite a large and complicated task and any proposal will be expected to be well-researched to reflect that. The ability to execute non-GUI binaries that make use of shared libraries should be the minimum to which such a project should aspire. OpenDarwin is available as a reference or to port relevant code from.

-

-Meta information:

-

-* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, binary file formats

-* Difficulty: Hard

-* Contact point: Samuel J. Greear <sjg@thesjg.com>

-

----

##### nmalloc (libc malloc) measurements and performance work

nmalloc is our libc memory allocator it is a slab-like allocator; it recently had some work done to add per-thread caches, but there is much more work that could be done. A project on this might characterize fragmentation, try out a number of techniques to improve per-thread caching and reduce the number of total syscalls, and see if any are worth applying.

@@ -437,14+348,267 @@ This thesis is an excellent overview of many techniques to reduce contention and

---

-##### Create a filesystem indexing service

-Currently to locate an arbitrary file on a dragonfly system you would use the locate(1), which(1) or whereis(1) tools. These are a bit clunky, paint in broad strokes and the accuracy of the database is often suspect. The first part of this project would involve implementing the Linux inotify interface in the DragonFly kernel. The second part would be to write a daemon that can (optionally) operate as an indexing service, if the weekly 310.locate periodic job see's that the locate database is being maintained by the daemon, it can skip running locate.updatedb(8). A third part of this project might involve extending the current database to a binary format with information about file types, what bits are set, etc. This could enable the user to have the locate tool paint in narrower strokes by specifying only files of type "ASCII text" or only files that are suid root or have the execute bit set.

+##### Make DragonFly multiboot capable

+Adjust the DragonFly kernel to be multiboot (the specification) capable. In addition, add necessary code to grub2 to understand our disklabel64 and anything else we need to be able to use grub2 to multiboot DragonFly without any chainloading involved.

Meta information:

-* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, binary file formats

+* Prerequisites: C, OS internals

* Difficulty: Easy/Moderate

+* Contact point: Alex Hornung <alexh@dragonflybsd.org>

+

+---

+

+##### Extend dsched framework to support jails

+Extend/modify the dsched framework to take into account jails and etc. instead of always allocating a 'tdio'. This would allow different process groupings (such as all processes in a jail) to be scheduled together. A new jail-specific policy would have to be written to support this, or an existing policy modified.

+The idea here is to support the execution of 32 bit DragonFly binaries in 64 bit DragonFly environments, something numerous other operating systems have done. Several things must be done to support this. First, the appropriate control bits must be set to execute in 32-bit compatibility mode while in usermode instead of 64-bit mode. Second, when a system call is made from 32-bit mode a translation layer is needed to translate the system call into the 64-bit requivalent within the kernel. Third, the signal handler and trampoline code needs to operate on the 32-bit signal frame. Fourth, the 32 and 64 bit ELF loaders both have to be in the kernel at the same time, which may require some messing around with procedure names and include files since originally the source was designed to be one or the other.

+

+There are several hundred system calls which translates to a great deal of 'grunt work' when it comes time to actually do all the translations.

+

+In 2012 a GSoC made reasonable progress on this project, a future GSoC student could pick up where he left off: http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/~ivan/dragonfly.git/shortlog/refs/heads/32bit_api_dirty_2

+##### Adapt pkgsrc to create a package system with dependency independence.

+* Create a set of tools (even better if it can be used like a library) that modifies how the pkgsrc packages are installed, allowing for the ability to upgrade individual packages, without stopping applications that depend on said packages from working. One method of achieving this is detailed at http://www.dragonflybsd.org/goals/#packages but other methods may be possible. PC-BSD have written a tool called PBI Builder which modifies FreeBSD ports for their dependency independence PBI system, this could be used as a starting point for the DragonFly BSD tools. Any attempt at this should leave room in the implementation to potentially work with other build systems, such as dports.

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C

+* Difficulty: ?

+* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org

+

+---

+

+##### Ability to execute Mach-O (OS X) binaries

+This is a project for a student with something to prove, executing a binary touches a huge number of moving parts of a modern kernel. This project would entail adding or porting support for Mach-O binaries to the DragonFly BSD kernel. It would also involve adding an additional system call vector, like the Linux vector used for linux binary emulation. This is quite a large and complicated task and any proposal will be expected to be well-researched to reflect that. The ability to execute non-GUI binaries that make use of shared libraries should be the minimum to which such a project should aspire. OpenDarwin is available as a reference or to port relevant code from.

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, binary file formats

+* Difficulty: Hard

* Contact point: Samuel J. Greear <sjg@thesjg.com>

---

+

+##### Installer rework

+Upgrade/partially rewrite the installer to be much simpler to maintain. As part of reworking the installer, several functions scattered around in other base utils should be factored out into libraries that both the installer and the util it comes from can use, e.g.:

+

+* partitioning (both GPT and MBR) should be factored out into two libraries, that the fdisk and the gpt tools use, but the installer can make use of, too.

+* disklabel32/64 functionality

+* adduser (and other user/group management)

+

+The updated installer should then make use of all these new libraries and other ones that are already available (libcryptsetup, libluks, liblvm, libtcplay) to offer more advanced features.

+

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C

+* Difficulty: Moderate

+* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org

+

+

+---

+

+##### Kernel - Add support for more CPUs

+

+DragonFly is currently limited to 63 CPU cores. Servers with more core than that are becoming sort of available or even potentially affordable. Supporting a number of cores greater than 63 is the first step in really testing SMP.

+* Add a hammer2 utility command and associated ioctl to set the encryption mode on a directory, to be inherited by any new files or subdirectories created therein.

+

+* Implement one encryption method. Encryption meta-data space is available in the blockref, usually around 192 bits, which can be used to specify e.g. a public key, salt, IV, and/or encryption chaining through the filesystem topology. Actual physical blocks must be encrypted in-place (1:1).

+* hammer2 implements a fully set-associative indirect block table with dynamic radix, which means that the entries in an indirect block table have a lot of flexibility, including the ability to have redundant entries representing the same block.

+

+* Implement hammer2's copies feature which allows one to configure multiple volumes and to specify that more than one copy of the filesystem topology be maintained. This requires both a realtime piece to handle filesystem modifications in progress, and a batch piece to tie-up loose ends. for a GSOC the batch piece is the easiest to implement for writing purposes, with a realtime piece for reading (but not writing, which would be much more difficult). The batch piece would simply traverse the filesystem looking for missing copies and construct the missing copies in batch or semi-real-time.

+

+* Such an implementation would allow HAMMER2 to operate with redundant hard drives and for hard drives to be ejected and added (within reason) on a live system.

+DragonFly has a simple regression testing framework, dfregress(8) and tbridge(9), that supports testing both userland and kernel modules.

+Potential work to be done:

+

+* Separate out the test runner from the results collector/aggregator/controller so that you can run the test runner on a VM or vkernel, and collect the results on a different system. That way, if the system under test crashes, the tests can continue.

+* Create necessary infrastructure, including provisioning, to be able to spin up VMs with DragonFly for testing, especially kernel testing. A first step would be to get this to work with spinning up vkernels.

+* Add support for per-testcase manifests instead of having to put everything in the runlist

+* Allow testcases to specify a list of artifacts that should be kept

+* Integrate all tests we have into dfregress

+* Add an html output generator like dfr2text. I have a started one laying around somewhere.

+DragonFly has no efficient solution for running other operating systems as guests.

+[Bhyve](http://bhyve.org/) is virtual machine manager for FreeBSD similar to the Linux KVM. This would be a big step forward for DragonFlyBSD, as it would allow us to run DragonFly on native hardware in situations where also Linux (or other operating systems) is required. IMHO, this would also reduce/eliminate the need for Linux 64-bit compatibility.

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C, heavy kernel knowledge

+* Difficulty: Hard

+* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org

+

+---

+

+##### Support DragonFly on bhyve - The BSD Hypervisor

+

+DragonFly needs a new loader to run on [Bhyve](http://bhyve.org/)

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C, heavy kernel knowledge

+* Difficulty: Hard

+* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org

+

+---

+

+##### Port VirtualBox

+DragonFly has no efficient solution for running other operating systems as guests. VirtualBox depends on

+a kernel module. Port this from FreeBSD.

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge

+* Difficulty: Medium-Hard

+* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org

+

+---

+

+##### Improve DragonFly as a VirtualBox guest

+When running DragonFly under VirtualBox, you don't have good support for graphics and also the clipboard is not working between host and guest. Port the virtualbox guest extensions to DragonFly.

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge

+* Difficulty: Medium-Hard

+* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org

+

+---

+

+##### Support KVM

+Add a KVM-compatible API to DragonFly, to be able to run qemu-kvm natively. This requires a fair bit of prior investigation as part of the proposal.

+

+This could be based on a port of bhyve (see the bhyve project on this page), with an added compatibility API for KVM.

+

+[https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt]

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge

+* Difficulty: Very Hard

+* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org

+

+

+---

+

+

+##### Tickless Kernel

+Make the DragonFly kernel tickless.

+

+Meta information:

+

+* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge

+* Difficulty: Medium-Hard

+* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org

+

+---

+

+##### Experiment with Rust in the kernel

+[Rust](http://www.rust-lang.org) is a safetly-oriented language in the same leage as C++ but without many of it's short-comings. It doesn't depend on a GC and can be used for very low-level tasks as well as high-level code. It is heavily developed by the Mozilla foundation.

+

+The GSoC project would consist of being able to write a simple kernel module in Rust and access some of the kernel API (kmalloc, etc.). It also includes bootstrapping Rust to DragonFly.

+

+What can be accomplished with Rust in the kernel? What would be the advantages and what the disadvantages? For example how could the device hierarchy be represented in Rust? Implementing a simple device driver. How can existing APIs be represented in Rust using traits? How could C call Rust code?

+How fast can be boot? Where (in which subsystems) is most time spend. What can we do to boot faster?

+

+* Research source of delays in boot process, keyboard init, scsi?

+* Better thread some hardware init, for example USB?

+* Perhaps look to see how Linux can boot in one second, better pci scan code?

+* "Some kernel work made it possible to do asynchronous initialization of some subsystems. For example, the modified kernel starts the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) initialization, to handle storage, at the same time as the Universal Host Controller Interface (UHCI), in order to handle USB" - http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/